Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Farewell To Trash (2010)

Farewell
To Trash

[Interview
with Lachlan Huddy August 2010, published in the first issue of Michael Adams' online
magazine Wordy Mofo]

It
was almost “Titfuck!”—exclamation mark mandatory.
“Schlockbuster” was another title jockeying for the prize.
“Blackbastard Video”, “I Spit On Your Video” and “Video
Sleazy” were all in contention, too. In the end, though, simplicity
carried the day, and Brisbane’s first, finest and filthiest
alternative video store was baptised Trash Video.

“It’s
a good filter,” says owner-manager Andrew Leavold of the evocative
moniker. “That kind of passive, mindless consumption that
categorises most movie-watchers. It’s a good filter to scare them
off.”

Since
1995, Trash has been the proud purveyor of everything beyond the flow
of cinema’s mainstream. Shock, schlock, art, grunge, indie, cult,
foreign, rare, grotesque or sublime—if it exists outside the realm
of casual moviegoing, Trash is the place to find it. Burning to take
in Microwave Massacre, the self-declared worst horror movie ever
made? It’s in the Trash stash. Can’t track down Leni
Reifenstahl’s 1930s Nazi propaganda Triumph of the Will for that
modern history essay? Pick it out of the Trash. And while you’re
there, why not indulge some nostalgia and plump for the Twin Peaks
Season Three double-VHS pack? Yes indeed, Trash is everything the
modern video shop isn’t: cluttered with obscurity, disorganised,
and bursting with character.

But
to speak of Trash is to speak of Leavold, its indefatigable founder;
the store is but an extension of the man himself, for whom the
creation and consumption of culture—popular and otherwise—is more
than a business or pleasure: it is a way of life. And has been for a
long, long while.

“Basically
this was an idea that I had when I was ten,” Leavold says. It’s a
July afternoon and we’re talking over the counter of Trash’s
current store in Brisbane’s West End. To the left sit neat piles of
rental DVDs stacked thirty and forty high; to the right the store
computer is near-buried under posters and VHS and other bric-a-brac
your local Civic would’ve sold off by now. There’s a touch of
gloom in the air, but we’ll get to that later—for now there’s
only Leavold in a Coney Island T-shirt, with his errant blonde hair
framing a wild-eyed face, telling Trash’s tale. It is, he says, “a
story of childhood obsession taken to ludicrous extremes.”

The
son of a civil engineer, Leavold spent his early years globetrotting
with a father who tended to accept “filthy overseas jobs”
throughout the Middle East. Starved of pop culture care of the slim
pickings on Arabic television, Leavold took his first step along the
road to Trashy treasure with the advent of Betamax (a videotape
format, for all you post-Gen X-ers). Late-night gems like “old
fucking Vincent Price films” and “the most grotesque horror films
that were just coming out as part of the Italian New Wave”
infiltrated the Middle East through pirate video networks, the
“Betamax Grapevine”—and found a spellbound audience in
ten-year-old Leavold.

“The
Indian guys who used to run the local video store used to wait for me
to come in,” he recalls fondly. “I’d pedal up on my bicycle and
they’d go, ‘Ah! We have a new zombie film for you. But don’t
tell your mother!’ And they would feed me fucking vile garbage…
It got to the point where my mother had written to every one of the
video shops I was a member of saying, ‘Do not give my son any more
horror films’.”

But
it was too late for little Andrew: an idea had taken root. “All the
time, I kept dreaming about having a video shop that had all these
movies that I loved in it. This kind of anal obsession as a
ten-year-old to control culture.”

It
was an obsession anal enough to persist throughout high school and
into his first job, during which he was “blowing every fucking
paycheck on a pile of VHS.” When his trove hit critical mass—at
somewhere around 2000 tapes—Leavold went public and Trash Video was
born, its first home a little walk-up over indie music club The Zoo
in Brisbane’s Fortitude Valley. It was a fine neighbourhood to
raise an alternative video store: grungy, unpretentious and not quite
suitable for the under-twelve set. But time waits for no cult film
fan, and after five years, when Trash’s stock had more than
tripled, the Valley had mutated.

“Trendy
fuckheads on bad drugs,” Leavold laments. “When all of a sudden
you find yourself surrounded by stores that sell $80 fucking can
openers, it’s time to go. The lease was up; we thought it was
either sink or swim time. We either try to do this somewhere else on
a larger scale or give up. And luckily one of our readers on our
email said, ‘Why don’t we try West End?’ That was ten years
ago.”

And
what a decade it’s been. Trash’s stock has swollen to a horde of
more than 16,000; a silent partner has come on-board as co-owner; a
2003 documentary — Escape From the Planet of the Tapes — has been
made about the store and about Leavold; and a loyal, close-knit
community of renters has entered Trash’s orbit. In the few hours
I’m here, Leavold greets every walk-in with a smile, easy
conversation or a few flicks reserved just for them: “Have I got
something for you?” is a regular refrain. No clinical efficiency
here; just a shared love of the movies, a gentle reminder of how
unifying a force cinema can be.

Still,
this is retail. It can’t all have been sugar and spice and
everything nice. Can it? “I’ve
seen you rip up someone’s membership,” a friend and regular
customer says to Leavold, smirking, before quoting, “‘Just get
out! No! No, I don’t care what you say! Just get out!’”

Leavold
is reflective. “Yeah. There have been a number of those public
meltdowns...I hate a lot of people for years. I carry grudges. Anyone
who transgresses the rules of politeness here.”

And
what are those, I wonder?

“It’s
based on ever-changing brain chemistry,” Leavold grins, with a
good-natured twitch of the nostril.

There’s
one particular memory, of course, that stands at the top of the Trash
heap. “Worst customer experience,” says Leavold, “was probably
having an elderly gentleman ask for rape-themed videos, specifically
rape between a father and a daughter.” I guess we’ve all been
there.

Outside
Trash’s hallowed aisles, meanwhile, the past decade saw Leavold
cement both himself and his store as cult cinema icons with Film
Club, weekly screening nights across Brisbane that ran until 2006
showcasing the best, worst and weirdest of Trash’s back catalogue.
He also launched Schlock Treatment, his weekly cult film TV show on
Brisbane’s Channel 31—and added his own cult curios to the world
of cinema.

2003’s
Lesbo-A-Go-Go, Leavold’s no-budget homage to 60s sexploitation icon
Doris Wishman (a woman oft-referred to as the female Ed Wood) is
“porn without porn”, a cheap, tawdry faux-morality play that
propels hapless heroine Sugar from one hideous travail—cemetery
rape, drug addiction, rape-during-abortion—to the next before
having her stabbed with a syringe and condemned by a priest as she’s
dying on the footpath. Shot in grainy black and white and featuring
no sync sound, Lesbo is as trashy in its delivery as it is vile in
its content, and leaves you in need of a shower and a good stiff
drink—right on the money, in other words. It’s elevated by a
soundtrack just this side of kick-ass and a frankly awesome
psychadelic colour sequence, and is a tremendously fun, sustained
in-joke for Wishman fans.

Like
any cult film worth its salt, Lesbo offended audience sensibilities
and ignited a riot of ire amongst the moral majority—particularly
when a drunken interview that Leavold gave to Brisbane newspaper The
Courier Mail left the mistaken impression that there’d been more
than just simulated sex going on during a shoot at Toowong Cemetery.

“The
article basically said we were filming gang-bangs on open graves,”
Leavold deadpans. “And immediately there was a shitstorm.” Quite
sensational for a film which, Leavold thinks, could have scraped in
with a PG-rating. “None of what you see on the screen is explicit.
There’s no profanity whatsoever. There’s no onscreen
salaciousness. It’s all implied.”

After
three years the shitstorm had slackened enough to allow Leavold back
behind the camera for 2006’s Bluebirds of Peace and Destruction, a
fictionalisation of the lesbian vampire killing in Brisbane’s
Orleigh Park in 1989. With $2000 from a generous Trash customer,
Leavold set about crafting the tale of three damaged women who abduct
a family man and murder him to drink of his blood.

“I
thought, right, the only way to do this is to totally improvise it,”
Leavold says. “Get two genuine…” He pauses, selecting his
words.

“Crack
whores?” offers the teenage work experience girl, familiar with the
story. “I
wouldn’t say crack whores,” Leavold replies. “No, I would say
two girls who are no strangers to the sex industry.” He cackles
infectiously.

The
girls may be no strangers to the sex industry, but they’re no
strangers to credible emotion, either; Bluebirds’ documentary
aesthetic is complimented by engaging naturalistic performances from
its lead actresses—friends of Leavold’s then and still—and a
fantastically foreboding score. Assembled with taut editing, it’s a
snappy, authentic and brutally effective ride into Brisbane’s seamy
underworld.

Then
there’s the upcoming The Search For Weng Weng. If there’s a
magnum opus in Leavold’s life so far, this is it: a guerilla doco
about Weng Weng, star of For Y’ur Height Only, a Filipino spy
thriller about a kung fu-kicking midget James Bond.

“Weng
Weng was, I think, was one of those catalytic moments where cinema
changes forever,” Leavold says. “Literally a bolt from the sky.
I’d never come across a film that was so inadvertantly a
masterpiece… Somehow that absurd image of a kung fu-kicking midget
had a weird kind of humanity about it and I wanted to know where he
came from, what his real name was, I wondered if there were other
Weng Weng films.”

Filmed
over four years and as many trips to the Philippines, The Search... is now
in post-production, Leavold struggling to, “get across the surreal
nature of the Philippines and the bizarre way that things just
literally fell out of the sky during the search for Weng Weng in
order to piece that story together… that layer of weirdness and
serendipity that covers everything.”

In
the meantime, his work on Search gave birth to Machete Maidens
Unleashed!, the new documentary from Not Quite Hollywood’s Mark
Hartley, which had its premiere at the Melbourne International Film
Festival on July 24.

“I
signed [Search] over to a producer here,” Leavold explains. “She
approached ABC. ABC went, ‘We’d rather have a more conventional,
essay-based documentary on B-filmmaking in the Philippines, like Not
Quite Hollywood, so why don’t we get that nice chap who made Not
Quite Hollywood to make it?’ And I went, [sighs] ‘Fine’,
graciously stepped aside, and Mark came onboard.”

Leavold’s
time in the Philippines also seeded the idea for a fittingly spun-out
feature film, which is now at second draft stage and has secured
partial funding. “It’s about an Australian who goes to the
Philippines to try and make a dwarf kung fu remake of The Harder They
Come, the Jamaican Spaghetti Western. Ends up losing his fucking
shit, you know, Francis Ford Coppola-style.”

And
is there any better way to lose one’s shit?

Amid
it all, his exhaustive research into Weng Weng caught the eye of
Brisbane academia, and landed him a place in—of all things—a
doctorate. “Griffith University said, ‘Why don’t you just turn
it into a thesis? You’ve done all your research. Now just write the
damn thing.’” So the directorial credit for The Search for Weng
Weng just might read Dr Andrew Leavold…

With
so many balls to juggle, it’s a miracle that Leavold can keep them
all in the air and still have time for the store that started it all.
But can he?

“You
know,” he says, gesturing around the shop, “you spend seven to
ten hours here, you have very little enthusiasm for anything else.”

Ah.
Remember the touch of gloom in the air we were speaking about
earlier? Here it is. According to Andrew Leavold, digital’s killed
the video shop. After fifteen years as Brisbane’s—and
Australia’s—largest cult video store, Trash Video is closing its
doors against the harsh light of a changing media landscape, in which
the likes of Foxtel IQ, Netflix and Bigpond Movies are rendering
quaint local video stores, with their physical constraints and
limited stock, all but obsolete.

“The
idea of an old-fashioned video shop has well and truly had its day,”
Leavold says, and it isn’t the voice of bitterness, nor defeat, but
the voice of a man content to move on. “The onus now is on
ownership. It just means that we’re consuming culture in a
different way now. Much more immediate. And, I think, with the
switchover of technology, that’s our cue to exit as gracefully as
we can.”

With
the day winding down, I finally take my leave from Trash. I’ve
stayed far longer than I’d planned, but it’s an easy place to get
lost in. I pause, peering down the aisles at the rows and rows of VHS
and DVD, thinking of the films inside each, the weird, the
enchanting, the scandalous. Somewhere here is the mutant fish baby
from Corman’s Humanoids from the Deep; the mad, murderous, Buddhist
Jew-burner from the nutso Czechoslovakian horror The Cremator; the
prehistoric stop-motion wonders from dino-western The Valley Of
Gwangi. Soon they’ll need to find new shelves from which to ply
their strange nightmares and stranger dreams—and perhaps no-one
will take them in. It’s a mournful thought, and I almost feel that
words should be said, some goodbye prayer.

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HERR LEAVOLD

Andrew Leavold owned and managed Trash Video, the largest cult video rental store in Australia, from 1995 to 2010. He is also a film-maker, published author, researcher, film festival curator, musician, and above all, unrepentant and voracious fan of the pulpier aspects of genre cinema. His writing has been published globally in mainstream magazines, academic journals and underground cinema fanzines, for the last two decades.

Leavold toured the world with his feature length documentary The Search For Weng Weng (2013). His ten years of research on genre filmmaking in the Philippines formed the basis of Mark Hartley's documentary Machete Maidens Unleashed! (released internationally in 2010), on which Leavold is also Associate Producer, and he has since been recognized both in the Philippines and abroad as the foremost authority in his area of expertise, teaching Philippine film history at university level in Australia, the United States, and throughout the Philippines. Leavold teamed with Daniel Palisa to co-direct The Last Pinoy Action King (2015), both a feature-length documentary on the late Filipino action idol Rudy Fernandez, and a dissection of film royalty, politics, privilege, idolatry, and the Philippines’ pyramid of power.

He is currently shooting two new feature-length documentaries – The Most Beautiful Creatures On The Skin Of The Earth (also with Palisa), the third in his Filipino trilogy, about erotic cinema under Marcos; and Pub, a history of the vibrant St Kilda music scene as told through its most outrageous progeny, Fred Negro. Both films are due for release in 2018.